Archive for August, 2009

Making designations in a transcript has traditionally been done via the old standby: the highlighter. It’s great for visually calling out a few sentences and thanks to the good folks at Crayola, you can even use yellow in certain cases and pink in others! … but when you take things electronic, you know you can do better (web tour, video).

On printed paper, you need that sentence to be as bright as possible, so you can actually find it when you’re frantically flipping through the stack later. Electronically though? Any product worth your time is going to provide easy (and well-organized) access to anything you’ve designated.

And what about when the same sentence (or sub/super sets) need to belong to different designations? We’ve all had that really enjoyable experience of the green/yellow/pink highlighters coming together to form such a lovely shade of bleh.

These factors and more came together to lead us to our original “marked in the margin” style of designations. Multiple designations in the same area? Some w/notes attached and others not? No problem.

Of course, as with any technological solution, sometimes it’s nice to be able to head back to the old standby. One of our new export options will provide that capability via the “Enable Background Highlighting” export option.

When background highlighting is enabled, the background of the designated text in the PDF is highlighted. We keep your sidebar denotation of “multiple designations” but with the additional familiarity of the highlighted text.